Just to clar­i­fy, there is still no agree­ment on what one should call an estab­lish­ment that pro­duces print­ed arti­cles.  My own view is that a Print­ing Works is the build­ing in which the print­ing is done; and a Print­ing Office is the build­ing in which that work is admin­is­tered and con­trolled.  Oth­ers, espe­cial­ly small mod­ern pri­vate press­es, use oth­er terms like: Stu­dio, Work­shop or even Lab­o­ra­to­ry.

A print­ing office is nec­es­sary in even the small­est com­mer­cial oper­a­tion whether a one-man out­fit or the vast thou­sand-plus hous­es of the last cen­tu­ry.  Sales, plan­ning and oth­er process­es are essen­tial along with some sys­tem to exe­cute these process­es.  The BFMP said that “…skill­ful and imag­i­na­tive admin­is­tra­tion is essen­tial”.  The tasks can be divid­ed and sub-divid­ed and we look here at the major head­ings and the pur­pos­es of these.  Put to prac­ti­cal use for the small print­er could mean the dif­fer­ent between mak­ing a prof­it or a huge loss.  Nat­u­ral­ly, the process­es here can be tai­lored to high- or low-vol­umes of work and com­plex­i­ty.  The idea of admin­is­ter­ing work relies on a steady flow of sales and enquiries before any of these process­es can be start­ed.

Estimating

Most demands for work would be for a new print­ed item (rather than a repeat of an exist­ing order), and so the esti­mate must take the infor­ma­tion avail­able and turn this in to a real­is­tic view of the charge to be made of the work.  Infor­ma­tion might be scant, so the esti­ma­tor has to use some assump­tions and imag­i­na­tion to flesh out some bare require­ments in to a fin­ished arti­cle.  The esti­mate will have to take account of the process­es, size, qual­i­ty, quan­ti­ty and cost of mate­ri­als as well as the type of machine to be used and time need­ed at each stage of the process.  Fur­ther work might be need­ed to encom­pass process­es that have to be per­formed out­side of the firm: out­work.  Exam­ples of this include bind­ing, foil­ing or emboss­ing.

Order Clerk

The order clerk’s role is to get the cus­tomer’s needs well-defined and then pro­duce a sched­ule or plan of how the work will be tack­led.  They will take the over­all plan of work and break it down in to indi­vid­ual instruc­tions for dif­fer­ent depart­ments.  This role is the link between the dif­fer­ent depart­ments that exe­cute the work.

Purchasing

The right mate­r­i­al at the right time on the best pos­si­ble terms is the pur­pose of the pur­chas­ing area.  They can be com­mis­sioned by the order clerk to buy mate­ri­als for the plan; but they can also be used to buy equip­ment or make oth­er cap­i­tal expense on behalf of the firm.  Exam­ples of com­mon tasks here are the pur­chase of paper and inks; but also type and equip­ment.

Costing

Cost­ing is the allo­ca­tion of all expens­es of the busi­ness incurred direct­ly and indi­rect­ly in the pro­duc­tion of jobs.  Small­er print­ers were tra­di­tion­al­ly bad at this activ­i­ty because they could not gath­er accu­rate infor­ma­tion about some of the indi­rect costs like rates, heat­ing and even jan­i­tors.  In miss­ing some of the less obvi­ous costs they under-priced their work and so grad­u­al­ly made mount­ing loss­es that took the firm under.  While this was going on they were under­cut­ting larg­er, but more effi­cient print­ers and they did not like this state of affairs.  The BFMP pub­lished a Fed­er­a­tion Cost­ing Sys­tem that went to incred­i­ble detail about iden­ti­fy­ing, record­ing and allo­cat­ing costs to work.  They empha­sised, though, that this was not an attempt to cre­ate uni­form pric­ing because they said find­ing the cost was one activ­i­ty but the price to the cus­tomer also includ­ed prof­it for the print­er and that was to their dis­cre­tion.

The essen­tial prin­ci­ples of cost­ing, and some illus­tra­tions, are:

• Iden­ti­fy the direct costs of a job.  Obvi­ous exam­ples include time to print and set the work; along with paper and ink.  Less obvi­ous exam­ples include stor­age costs for that par­tic­u­lar job (cov­er­ing space but also met­al tied-up in that job) and pack­ag­ing
• Add to that a pro­por­tion of the indi­rect costs like inter­est on loans, sales­man­’s expens­es, heat­ing and light­ing, can­teens etc.
• Indi­rect costs should only be iden­ti­fied where it is impos­si­ble to make the cost direct. As an exam­ple, the floor space of each machine should be used to allo­cate rent and rates to that machine so a com­bined cost of run­ning that machine for an hour is cre­at­ed includ­ing: cap­tial, space, man­pow­er, main­te­nance etc.  In this way there’s no pos­si­bil­i­ty of effi­cient, use­ful machines sub­si­dis­ing old­er machines with­out any­one know­ing

Pricing and Invoicing

This process is con­cerned with get­ting a price to charge to the cus­tomer and invoic­ing the cus­tomer accord­ing­ly.  The price will have to account for the costs, but also the orig­i­nal esti­mate and any vari­a­tion in the job as it flows through the works.  Vari­a­tion might come because anoth­er type of paper had to be used to meet the timescales; or because the cus­tomer asked for changes after a proof.

The typ­i­cal struc­ture of the activ­i­ties of the print­ing estab­lish­ment are shown in the table below.